First English-language edition published 2018
Copyright © 2010 by Roque Larraquy
Translation © 2018 by Heather Cleary
Cover design by Kyle G. Hunter
Book design by Rachel Holscher
Author photograph © Pablo García
Translator photograph © Walter Funk
First published by Editorial Entropía, Buenos Aires, as La comemadre, © 2010
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Larraquy, Roque, 1975– author. | Cleary, Heather, translator
Title: Comemadre / Roque Larraquy; translated by Heather Cleary.
Other titles: Comemadre. English
Description: First English-language edition. | [Minneapolis]: Coffee House Press, 2018. | “First published by Editorial Entropía as La comemadre, 2010” — ECIP galley.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017056244 | ISBN 9781566895224 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Physicians—Fiction. | Cruelty—Fiction. | GSAFD: Dystopian fiction. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ7798.422.A76 C6613 2018 | DDC 863/.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056244
Cover images: cross section of human tissue © Komsan Loonprom/Shutterstock.com; human eye illustration © RYGER/Shutterstock.com; bacteria illustration © Morphart Creation/Shutterstock.com; eye surgery illustration © iStockphoto.com/ilbusca
The advertisement across from the title page was originally published in Caras y Caretas, no. 459, July 20, 1907.
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What predominates in any change is the survival of earlier material. Infidelity to the past is only relative.
—Ferdinand de Saussure,
Course in General Linguistics
The middle class will save Argentina.
Its triumph will be felt throughout the world.
—Benjamín Solari Parravicini,
Prophetic psychographic from 1971
Contents
1907: Temperley, Province of Buenos Aires
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
2009: Buenos Aires
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Funder Acknowledgments
About the Authors
1907 Temperley, Province of Buenos Aires
1
There are people who don’t exist, or who barely do, like Ms. Menéndez. The head nurse. She fits entirely into the space of those words. The women who report to her smell and dress alike and call us “Doctor.” If a patient takes a turn for the worse due to an oversight or one too many injections, they brim with presence: they exist in errors. Menéndez, on the other hand, never makes a mistake, which is why she’s the head nurse.
I watch her whenever I can, trying to find some private gesture, a secret, an imperfection.
I found it. Menéndez’s five minutes. She leans against the railing and lights a cigarette. She tends not to look up, so I observe her unnoticed. Her expression suggests an absence of thought, an empty bottle. She smokes for five minutes. In this time she manages to finish only half the cigarette. Her extravagance, her personal indulgence, is putting it out with a dab of saliva on the tip of her finger and tossing it into the trash. She smokes only fresh cigarettes. This is how she enters the world every day, like clockwork, and exists just long enough for me to fall in love with her.
I have many colleagues and still can’t tell them all apart. There’s a stocky fellow with a mole on his chin who always says hello to me and about whom I remember nothing but his mole. I don’t know his name or his specialization. One side of his face sags, and when he speaks—about what, exactly, I couldn’t say—he squints as if staring into an intense light.
Each word Sylvia utters is a fly leaving her mouth, and she must avoid speaking to keep their numbers down. I immerse her in freezing water. When I let go she lifts her head, takes a breath, and repeats her question: “You don’t see the flies coming out of me?” My not seeing them matters more to her than the cold. I still have no idea why they assigned her to me. I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m confident that the only thing the freezing water does is put her at risk of pneumonia, but the important thing is the persistence of the delusion, which the ice bath should curtail. I promise her a warm bed. All changes must be noted down: if she chooses not to speak, if she asks for her family (she has none, but at least this delusion would be a healthier one), if there are no more flies. She watches them dissolve on the ceiling.
You don’t think the thoughts of a nurse. You spend your five minutes smoking a cigarette with a blank expression on your face, as if you were not a woman but merely your woman’s work, yet you think about things that are not catheters or serums, things that have no shape.
There she is. A cloud of nurses trails behind her asking for help, advice, medical histories, cleaning products. I’m pomaded. Getting closer. The cloud is easy to disperse. They make way, trying not to invade my personal space. We doctors have earned a bodily right that the nurses, with their enemas and their thermometers, respect in virtually no one else.
“Menéndez!”
“Yes, Doctor Quintana?”
It’s lovely to hear her say my name. I give her some instruction or other.
The sanatorium is on the outskirts of Temperley, a few miles from Buenos Aires. It is most active during the day shift, which receives an average of thirty patients. The desolate night shift has been under my charge for the past year. My patients are men who tussle at knifepoint in nearby guesthouses and appreciate our discretion with the law. The nurses are afraid of them. They file out along the path that cuts through the park before nightfall. I don’t recall ever seeing Menéndez leave. She’s always here. Does she live in the sanatorium? I make a note: Ask.
Night arrives and there is nothing to do. Might as well walk the halls looking for a conversation or a game of cards to give the time some shape. A nurse leans against the wall with her hands in her pockets. Her associate stares at the floor.
Doctor Papini trots toward me with his index finger to his lips in an appeal for silence. He has freckles and a habit of fondling the breasts of unconscious old ladies. He occasionally confides the details of his life to me, and I find his deliberate obscenity vaguely repulsive. He guides me to a small room.
“Do you know what’s in the morgue right now, Quintana?”
“The red wine you hid there on Tuesday.”
“No, that’s all gone. We had to give a few bottles to the cleaning lady to keep her quiet. Come with me.”
Papini opens a drawer and takes out an anthropometric instrument he bought on the Paseo de Julio and was never allowed to use in the sanatorium, on Ledesma’s orders. He is sweating, exophthalmic, and smells like lemon. This indicates that he is happy, or believes that he is happy. His personality is defined by this sort of thing.
“Strange things are happening, Quintana. Women are locking themselves in the washroom and spending long stretches of time on the bidet. They say nothing when they come out.
This ritual isn’t about hygiene or masturbation, I assure you. I myself opened my wife’s legs and smelled her: nothing. She tol
d me she’d been brushing her teeth. But I heard her in there! There’s no confusing the sound of a bidet. I’m incapable of many things, my friend, especially of killing my wife. But there are those who could, you see. Who would make her confess, because this ritual of water and ceramic is a threat to all men. Women use cosmetics to erase their features, squeeze themselves into corsets, and have many orgasms, yes? A number that would dry us out completely. They’re different. They come from a special kind of ape that was previously an otter, and before that was a bluish amphibian or something with gills. Their heads are a different shape, too. They shut themselves in with the bidet to think moist thoughts that suit the contours of their heads. The threat. I’m a good man, I don’t have the stomach to do anything about it. But there are those who do. They grab them by the hair and demand to know why they spend so much time on the bidet, and if the women don’t answer, they carve them up with their knives. These men are as different from us as women are. They came from a different ape than we did: an inferior species, but robust and enduring. There’s one in the morgue. We’re going to take his measurements. You’ll see that his cranium matches the description of atavism, of a born killer. We have to do it now because they’re taking him away in the morning. You’re an intelligent man, but stubborn. I’m going to bury you in evidence.”
“This fellow killed his wife because she wouldn’t tell him what she was doing on the bidet?”
“It’s a metaphor, Quintana.”
As we step into the hall I remember that there are no bidets in the sanatorium bathrooms. Menéndez can hide nothing from me. No moist thoughts, no threats. Papini’s speech accelerates as he walks toward the morgue, leaving a trail of lemon in his wake.
“It’s the so-called qualitative leap, Quintana. At night we come up with daring plans that would change us completely, were they to become a reality. But these plans dissolve in the morning light, and we go back to being the same mediocrities as before, doggedly ruining our own lives. This doesn’t happen to you? With these men, it’s different. Why do you think they’re still around, if they’re so inferior to us? It’s a question of adaptation: they act. They carry out the plans they make at night. What’s more, they’re depraved. They wear too much pomade, smell like tobacco, sweat bile, and masturbate frequently. They have no morals. They do, however, have an ethics that neither you nor I could comprehend, which involves eradicating us. Do you understand?”
“How do you know they wear too much pomade?”
“You’re taking me very literally, Quintana.”
We enter the morgue, the brightest room in the sanatorium. With his freckles, Papini looks like a bedraggled adolescent. If the men he just described to me do exist, he is one of them. The body is on the table. Menéndez must never see me under this light.
“He was hanged by his cellmates. Do you see the look in his eyes, their color? There’s the line of bruising at the neck. Look at his forehead, how narrow it is. Asymmetrical cranium, smaller than average for a Caucasian, convex in the right temporoparietal zone. Ideas must have come to him all squashed. How much energy would it take to move that jaw? Compare and contrast, Quintana. You aren’t what anyone would call handsome, but your features are in the right place. Your balls, well, I don’t know. You tell me, right? A man’s balls are his own business. But just look at him: left eye three or four millimeters below the right; huge ears; lower canines more prominent than the upper. This man didn’t chew, he shredded meat. Lift his foot, Quintana, bend his leg at the knee. See that? Prehensile. A man with a small head, to keep things simple, and teeth made for crushing our femurs in a single bite, covered in hair. Do you see? A few years from now, we’ll be able to identify these animals fresh out of their mothers. We can empty their nuts if they’re male, or take out their uterus if they’re female.”
“Why not just kill them outright?”
“You’re not taking me seriously, Quintana.”
“I hate to be rude, Papini. But this man is an isolated case.”
“We’ll measure you and your thick skull, then. Or someone else, for a point of comparison.”
“Let’s measure Ms. Menéndez.”
She steps into my office, accompanied by Papini. She knows this meeting falls outside her job description. It shows in her face, which is not her own, and in the backward slant of her body.
The explanations we give are few and vague. She realizes her head is at stake but does not know that Papini is hoping to find a criminal (or not, either result would be valid) and I am hoping for a wife. She takes a seat and allows herself to be measured. She has pale skin, blue eyes, and a slightly crooked nose. Her response to pain (Papini is pricking her finger) is modest.
I don’t dare speak to her. What primate lurks beneath the surface of Ms. Menéndez? None, I think. I might assign her an amphibian lineage, but nothing more.
I look out the window. A line of ants emerges from a crack in the wall and inscribes a large circle as it advances. The front of the line forms the circumference, and the others fill it in until the crack and the ants disappear and all that is left on the wall is a brittle, chitinous blotch of legs. I assume their worldview is defined by this circularity.
I find Sylvia sitting on the edge of her bed. She asks me to open the window and inquires about the weather. It’s cold. The news pleases her: flies can’t stand the cold. She is still talking about flies. I think, in parentheses, about Menéndez. The two curved lines bend toward each other, trapping Menéndez inside my head and my head inside the parentheses . . .
Should I allow myself these intrusions, these fantasies? Is this healthy? I don’t even know her first name. Why am I blushing? Have I no shame?
I need to switch primates. Carry out in the day the plans I make at night.
“Have you ever been in love, Sylvia?”
She is saying something about bundling up in flies but goes along with the change of topic.
“Yes.”
“With whom?”
“I’d prefer not to say, Doctor.”
“Was it mutual?”
“Yes.”
“And how did this man tell you he loved you?”
“He said, ‘Sylvia, I think of you often.’”
“He lied.”
Where is she? It has to be now. Before I don’t know what to say. Not that I know now, either, but the initiative is there.
The doctor with the mole says that Menéndez is in the sanatorium, but he doesn’t know where, and it would be best not to disturb her if she’s in her room.
How can she live in a sanatorium?
I watch her walk into Ledesma’s office and am drawn toward her like a magnet, only to have some insolent creature, or perhaps it was her, slam the door in my face.
I’m reminded that there’s a special meeting in progress. We crowd around Ledesma’s door. I have to wait my turn, same as the others. The human heap of my colleagues. Doctor Gigena is an enthusiast: he wears glasses, and it’s said that the patients like him best because he distracts them with jokes during their injections. According to Doctors Gurian and Sisman, Gigena’s penchant for acting like a funny uncle undermines his professional stature. Papini cracks wise on the subject.
More doctors arrive. Our bellies begin to graze, our buttons catch, static electricity stands our whiskers erect. We would have gone on like that, surreptitious pawings punctuating the wait, but Mr. Allomby, on whom our salaries depend, appears, and we clamor to attention. He almost never visits the sanatorium. The meeting is more important than we’d thought. Time to dig the skeletons out of our closets and make a gallows of them.
Someone greets him in English, with terrible pronunciation. Afraid of sullying his aura, we suck in and pile up even more tightly. This time, however, we are not synchronized in our efforts. One straggler trips over the feet of another and crashes into the office door. It swings open.
We see Ledesma on all fours under his desk. Some of us find getting on all fours in a train station objectionable, but we
see nothing wrong with an upstanding fellow doing so in the privacy of his own office. There are others, however, who consider assigning him a nickname, refusing to follow his orders, and demanding his resignation for impropriety. This difference of opinion makes us uncomfortable. We hold our breath until Ledesma feels our eyes on him. He turns to look at us.
“Not yet . . . No hora,” says Mr. Allomby, closing the door.
Ledesma and Mr. Allomby are seated at the desk. The meekest huddle close to this nucleus of authority, leaning forward in search of approval and protection. The more self-assured among us sit further away, cool and collected, bellies self-satisfied.
“Were you able to catch it, Menéndez?” Ledesma shouts.
Menéndez steps into the office, a squawking duck in her hands. It’s quite an entrance. The eyes of several of my colleagues fall on her for the first time and remain. She exists by order of the director.
“Put it on that table,” says Ledesma.
The glass tabletop is too slippery for the duck. When it regains its balance, it returns to the impassivity characteristic of its species. Next to it is a wooden box of average size. Its lid, which opens down the middle, has a large, round aperture at its center, bordered by the word ergo. Under the lid is a blade that shoots out horizontally with the speed and force of a crossbow. On the sides of the box, next to reliefs of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, are the words cogito and sum, respectively. The phrase and figures clearly bear allegorical weight, which diminishes the charm of the whole.
“Our poor Cartesian duck,” quips Ledesma.
He slides the duck into the guillotine through a trapdoor underneath and sticks its head through the opening. Then, just like that, he activates the device. The blade moves so quickly that not a drop of blood is spilled. The Cartesian duck’s head remains on the ergo. It seems to have felt nothing. It looks at us. Or thinks the thoughts of a duck. It stays like that for a few seconds, honking occasionally, before its eyes and its foray into this world come to a close.
I can’t tell if Menéndez is watching or if she chose to look away. In any event, she’s the one who has to remove the body, which she wraps in a clean cloth before taking her leave of us.
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